During the holiday period, my income from writing goes down. One way to make this up is for me to earn a few pennies from Amazon. So if you are going to be buying from Amazon during the next while, if you go through one of my links, I will earn those few pennies. Collectively, they add up. There's a link on this article to buy emerald jewelry near the top of the article. If you click on it, and then move to buy whatever it is you want, I will get those few pennies. Thank you so much. :)

Tessa Schlesinger: +Prince.m James​ About what? I prefer to keep all my conversations public. I also just checked your profile. It's blank. You don't say anything worth reading. You have also added any number of attractive women. No men. Thanks, but no thanks. I'll give you a miss.

Prince.m James: Am new here...but we can be together on our private chat on hangout.

Tessa Schlesinger: This is not a dating site. This is a serious intellectual venue for worlf economic systems. I have no interest in talking to you 'privately.' If you persist, I will report you for harassment.

So in memory of my late father, my sister and I are going to be stargazing (or should I say meteor watching) tonight. My late father was heavily into astronomy and served as chairman/president of the local astronomical society for decades. :)

Katherine Schock: Excellent introspection! I managed to exorcise most of my own personal demons and the small ones I still have are manageable thankfully... thoroughly enjoyed your commentary, so well done! ;-))

QUOTE: Overall, everybody rated the fictional housemate applicants with typos and grammatical errors in their emails as worse than those with perfect spelling and grammar. But there were definitely certain personality types that judged the typo-riddled applicants more harshly.

QUOTE: And people who tested as being more conscientious but less open were more sensitive to typos, while those with less agreeable personalities got more upset by grammatical errors.

QUOTE: Scientists have found that people who constantly get bothered by grammatical errors online have "less agreeable" personalities than those who just let them slide.

I don't think that is why Occupy failed. I think it failed because we are naive to think that anyone in power pays any attention to protests Do you think that the women's protest made any difference to Trump's decisions? Of course not.

What the 1% have learnt is that they don't have to pay any attention to protests - that the people feel vindicated in just having them, and that they don't make any difference to voting their representatives into power in the next election cycle.

Think about that.

At what point - ever - did a great majority of senators and/or congressman get kicked out of the house and the senate?

I firmly believe that we have to change things is from the bottom up.

One of the leaders of Occupy went into a small town in Oregon and started making changes at that level. I believe he has the right idea. We-the-people need to start putting extreme pressure on our current representatives by making them aware that we have others to replace them if they even set one foot out of line.

We have to watch them like hawks. We have to ask them why they didn't vote, why they voted in opposition to their supporters. We have to ask them by what moral right they're entitled to make any extra money other than their salaries.

The Occupy Wall Street movement was a brief and failed attempt by the American people to wrest a bit of democracy back into the American political system: It was a movement whose goal was to point out, and begin to correct, the utterly disproportionate amount of power the wealthy and corporations wield in the US (and around the world).

With each passing year, the problems that motivated the Occupy protestors become more and more severe. And their message becomes more and more relevant, urgent and global.

And yet the Occupy movement is most often cited, not as response to the growing American plutocracy, but as as an example of a spectacular failure.

Who paints that picture of Occupy and why? What do they have to gain by convincing the world's people that protests such as Occupy are pointless and doomed to fail? (The answer to this question is, as the answer is to so many questions: Follow the money.)

And perhaps more importantly, What lessons can we, the world's people, learn from Occupy and its "failure" in the US?

The fate of Occupy must serve as a lesson to us in the likely response to any peaceful revolt from the Left. It's an extremely important lesson.

What did Occupy do wrong?

(1) Was it violent? No. It was extremely peaceful, and there is reason to believe the few incidents of violence that did occur may have been initiated by "plants" who weren't actually part of the movement. (One has to wonder about the same in the case of other protests, such as Ferguson, MO: Mow much of the violence, looting, etc., was committed by actual protestors and how much was committed by people from the opposite perspective who infiltrated the protests in order to make them look bad?) It is worthy of note that Occupy remained nonviolent even in the face of violent responses from the police (recall, for example, what happened at UC Davis; this was only one [particularly well-publicized] example of many).

(2) Was it, as accused, "disorganized", "pointless" or "without a message"? No. The Occupy protestors had a clear message: Get money out of politics. (Plus all the sub-messages that follow from that.) However, the media, politicians, business, etc., -- that is, precisely the people Occupy was protesting -- succeeded in portraying the protestors as being disorganized, without a clear purpose, etc. If Occupy had one flaw in this family of flaws, it was that it was too unexpected: If the American people had known (a) that the protest was going to happen and (b) why, then it would have been much more difficult for the media and their puppet masters to portray the movement as disorganized and pointless. On this score, the Women's March on Washington was much more successful: People knew that it was going to happen and they knew why, and as a result it was difficult or impossible for the oligarchs to brush it off as a fluke.

What this leads me to conclude is that the organizers of Occupy simply underestimated what they were up against. They didn't plan enough in advance, they didn't know what to expect in response to their protest, and they didn't make their existence -- and the reasons for their protest -- known broadly enough in advance. They also didn't expect as strong a response form the plutocrats as they received. Ironically, this strong response was a symptom of the fact that Occupy was onto something very important, and the plutocrats knew it.

The oligarchs were (are) afraid of the Occupy movement, and they marshaled all their media, police and other resources to squash and belittle the movement.

Occupy did not fail because they were wrong, or because they were violent, or because they didn't have genuine grievances or a clear message. They failed because they didn't plan to counter the kinds -- and the scale -- of the oligarchs' resistance to their message.

The failure of Occupy was not a symptom of its irrelevance, as the oligarchs, plutocrats and out-right fascists would have you believe. It was, ironically, a symptom of its importance.

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Tessa Schlesinger: +Wwjudasdo 2 I am in complete agreement. I am just about to sit down and write a book and deal with exactly that point. For as long as I have been on G+, I have asked for people to contribute their ideas on designing new economic and political systems for the 21st century...

Tessa Schlesinger: +Doug Senko Which is why we need preparation. We need to start organizing. We do not have a lot of time left. We need to start figuring out ways to survive without provision from the oligarchs.

James Karaganis: Whatever system we come up with will need to account for the manufacture of material goods with vastly less human involvement.